Area researchers work to keep astronauts in space healthy

By Eric Berger |
March 19, 2012

NASA may no longer have rockets to fly its astronauts into space, but its work to one day make deep space missions a reality is continuing.

One of the biggest challenges in flying astronauts far from home is their health - there's no 24-hour emergency department on the way to Mars - and during the past 15 years Houston has quietly become the world leader in space medicine.

On Monday the region celebrated this with the opening of a new, 16,400-square-foot space medicine research facility on the Rice University campus next to the Texas Medical Center.

"NASA has a fundamental need to discover ways to keep people healthy during long-duration spaceflight missions," said Mike Coats, director of Johnson Space Center.

The two institutions will now support basic research and train physicians in space medicine in a building that overlooks the stadium where President John F. Kennedy gave his "We choose to go the moon" speech.

With an annual budget of $24 million, the space medicine institute funds some 60 research projects spread across the country.

Among the most promising is a technology that not only can detect kidney stones with ultrasound imaging but treat them as well.

Relatively portable when compared with magnetic resonance imaging and other techniques that allow physicians to see inside the body, ultrasound has become an important resource aboard the International Space Station for diagnosing all manner of health ailments.

A group of University of Washington-based physicists has created a way to not only detect small kidney stones in patients, but to use ultrasound pulses to "push" the stones out of the kidney so they can be passed.

"If you're going to go to Mars or the moon, you really can't turn back," said Lawrence Crum, the project's lead researcher. "A bad kidney stone could represent a mission critical failure."

The technology, in turn, has applications on Earth as well, and the developers are working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to using the imaging and pushing technology in ground-based patients to help them avoid surgery.

The new facilities on the Rice campus provide the space medicine institute a centralized location in which to work with medical researchers, academic scientists and engineers as well as astronauts and flight surgeons from NASA, said Dr. Jeffrey Sutton, the institute's president.

There is also lab space for demonstrations and tests of new technologies that can then be transferred for use in the space program.

And there's a lot of technology needed before NASA can safely send humans beyond Earth's orbit for long periods of time. In deep space astronauts will have to worry about radiation exposure, bone loss, muscle loss, lack of hospital facilities and, as researchers just announced last week, changes in the eyes and brains of astronauts who spent prolonged periods of time in space.

"Pretty much every system of the body is affected by spaceflight," Sutton said. "The more we study medicine in space, the more we learn. I expect we'll find a lot more syndromes as more people fly."

During Monday's ceremony the space medicine institute also honored U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchsion, R-Texas, who obtained funding for its ongoing work.